Views on everything going on at Chelsea, from the first team, to the reserves, the youth team and transfer targets straight from the Shed End...and even the Allianz Arena

Tuesday, 12 June 2012

One more signing required?

After the inevitable signing of Hulk goes through, which in my opinion will be before the end of the month. And is only being stalled by the agent in an attempt to increase wage demands. This should end our buying for the summer for a number of important reasons. As continuing signing players could have a negative impact on the club and squad.

Firstly Fifa Fair Play rules, despite being given £49.5m for winning the Champions League its not all money we can spend on players this year. The price of a player is the overall cost divided by the amount of years and then accounted yearly for FFP rules. (E.g. Hazard costs £32m and signed a 5 year deal so for each of the 5 years we have a £6.4m cost rather than a blackhole of £32m to fill). This means we will still be paying off the Torres deal plus as a club we are also making a loss due to high wages and need to use some of the money from the Champions League win to clear the deficit. Therefore continued spending this summer would have a damaging effect, at best we are unable to sign players for a couple of years while the buys recently go through the duration of their contract or at worst we break the FFP rules and are expelled from Europe which would have a devastating impact financially on the club.

The problem with signing players every time the squad is not deep in talent is that it is expensive as well as youth are unable to be brought into the side. There are people saying the club should sign another striker, the problem with this is that if you sign back-up for Torres, someone better than Sturridge, in my opinion costing at least £20m (E.g. Lewandowski), and if Lukaku has a good year on loan. Then you could start the 2012/2013 season with Torres/Lewandowski/Sturridge/Lukaku, which is over £100m worth of talent fighting for one position on the pitch. Resulting in most likely Sturridge and Lukaku leaving due to lack of first team football.

This links to getting the right balance for squad depth, it is important that there are enough players to allow rotation and cover injuries but at the same time making sure that the squad is not too deep so that everyone gets the playing time they desire to remain happy. Torres is most likely to thrive if there is not too much competition so he can focus on being the main threat and getting plenty of game time under his belt. Its about getting the right balance and treating each player the right way to get the best out of him.